What I love and why I love it -- mainly classic stars and movies of the golden age. Backstories, links, sidelights -- details like these increase your enjoyment of classic films. What do they say to us now? Who were we then, and how did we solve our problems? What did we believe -- and what have we forgotten?

Blog Archive

29 September 2018

I LIve My Life: Joan Crawford is a Madcap Heiress With a Brain

(NOTE: This is a repost from 2016. This film will be shown on TCM on 10/2/2018 at 6:15 A.M. EST)

I Live My Life is a mid-MGM Joan Crawford vehicle that some
people love to hate; I’ve heard it called Joan’s worst movie, along with
The Bride Wore Red and Ice Follies of 1939 (I like those, too!) But I
really can’t agree with that. I Live My Life actually has several things
going for it, including a strong cast with some wonderful performances
and, most importantly, a script by Joseph L. Mankiewicz.

Joan
is still the “shopgirl’s delight” in this one, with plenty of glamor
and a large wardrobe of gowns by Adrian. It was the era of the madcap
heiress — practically every major female star played at least one of
these mythical damsels, including serious actresses like Barbara
Stanwyck and Bette Davis.
Admittedly, the plot is rather
unbalanced, giving the movie as a whole a sort of disjointed feel — the
charming parts are too short and the annoying parts too drawn-out. The
rhythm is off. But on the upside, Crawford herself is very engaging as a
rich girl who actually thinks about things.

Not that
she’s an angel. As the story opens, Kay Bentley and her set are cruising
fairly pointlessly around the Greek islands on a luxury yacht, spending
their days playing bridge and engaging in various other upper-class
time wasters. Kay herself seems discontented, feeling that sailing all
the way to Greece without going ashore even once is pretty much plumbing
the depths of laziness. We also learn that she’s planning to marry one
of the young men in the party, more as a business merger than a romance —
his father is in business with her father. All in all, although she
knows she’s very fortunate, she’s really not very pleased with herself.
On the spur of the moment, she decides to go ashore. On reaching the
nearest tiny village, she hires a donkey and rides up a trail into the
mountains, where she comes across something she has very seldom seen
before — dedicated professionals doing useful work. In this case, they
are a team of archaeologists, headed by the extremely attractive Terry
O’Neill (Brian Aherne), who are excavating a temple site which contains
an extremely rare, 2,000-year-old intact statue by Praxiteles.

To
Kay’s chagrin, none of the men are even remotely interested in her,
however much she flirts. They just wish she would go away so they can
get on with their work. After various ploys to get their attention —
especially Terry’s — she slips and twists her ankle. Exasperated, he
carries her back to the village, but on arriving she reveals that she
was faking all the time. She thinks this is hilarious, but he doesn’t —
he picks her up and carries her back to the dig site, and points her
towards the trail. Deflated, she trudges back.
It
seems that Kay is dissatisfied with the impression she made, because
the next day she returns to the village and seeks Terry out in the cafe
where he’s eating lunch. She apologizes for fooling him and, in his
eyes, wasting his valuable time. On the spur of the moment, she also
deceives him again, telling him she’s just a secretary to one of the
businessmen on the yacht. This makes him a lot more approachable. In
fact, after spending a whole day and evening with her he tells her he’s
fallen in love with her.

Rather
cold-bloodedly, Kay insists that she’s got to leave on the yacht the
next day — but says he can reach her through her business address. To
her eventual discomfiture, Terry does just that. Having accompanied the
statue to New York, he discovers her deception.

Terry meets Kay's friends, who he sees as pampered, useless idiots

He also meets Kay’s ineffectual but very
kindly father, played by the wonderful Frank Morgan, who invites him to
come home to a cocktail his daughter is having. Terry does so, and gets
an overview of the spoiled and useless society types she considers her
friends. He confronts her and she defends herself; he angrily storms
off.

The next day, she impulsively — and rather rudely —
goes to the museum to see Terry’s lecture on the statue. After throwing
her weight around to get into the closed lecture, she apologizes to him
again, saying she can’t help being how she is, because she’s been
spoiled all her life.
There follows an argument which to me,
frankly, is worth the whole film, and I’d bet anything it came right
from the mind of Joseph L. Mankiewicz. After hearing Kay’s big speech
about knowing she’s spoiled and useless, but not being able to help it —
“That’s just the way I am!” she says plaintively — Terry, instead of
accepting her apology, says, “Stop talking like that — it’s so weak!”

An intelligent conversation courtesy of Joseph L. Mankiewicz

Bristling, she replies, “I merely told you what I am.”
“Well,
stop being what you are! All those pretty words don’t mean anything. If
you don’t like the way you are, why don’t you change yourself?”
They proceed to have another tiff, but this one culminates in a love scene.
The
plot now begins to careen all over the place, with some nice comic
scenes, but an overall choppy effect. After the love scene in the
museum, we next see Kay all dressed up in an evening gown by Adrian,
preparing for a big formal party. It seems Terry is going too. At the
party, we see the young man who was Kay’s almost-fiancee on the yacht
plotting with his father to induce her to marry him, even though she’s
in love with Terry; they lead her to believe that her father is facing
disastrous business losses, and will need the enormous monetary
settlement her grandmother is supposed to settle on Kay on her marriage.
She rather naively falls for this, and tries to brush Terry off.

This
is the point where the plot gets annoying, with pretty pointless
on-again, off-again romance; it’s already been established that the two
attractive young stars are in love and obviously will end up together.
The machinations of the rather half-hearted villains, if they can be
called that, to get Kay and her money married to the wrong man lamely
rest on her believing everything they say without question, something I
think a great heiress would have learned not to do.

On
the other hand, this is also the point where the great Frank Morgan
shines. As Kay’s father, he has so far been genial and loving, but
considered by everyone to be ineffectual. His late wife, Kay’s mother,
was the heiress; all he has he owes to his mother-in-law (terrific Jesse
Ralph, who doesn’t have enough to do). Unfortunately, he has been
speculating, in an effort to free himself from her dominance and prove
his business abilities. But he has lost a large sum of money. But when
he discovers that Kay is marrying a man she doesn’t love to collect a
large settlement from her grandmother, which she (again rather naively)
intends to turn over to her father as soon as the knot is tied. So to
free her from this obligation, which he pretends to know nothing about,
he tells her he has instead made a killing in the market. Morgan is
wonderful here, showing the father’s happiness at giving his daughter
happiness, as well as his hidden disappointment in himself that he has
to pretend to accomplishments that he doesn’t in fact have, namely
business skill. Kay joyously telephones Terry to tell him it’s all on
again.

Amazingly, and annoyingly, there follows another
round of disagreements and reconciliations, as the wealthy Bentley
faction tries to tame Terry by making him a highly paid, although, in
his own eyes, useless executive. This does not work. They fight, they
make up, they plan a big wedding, they fight, they almost call off the
wedding — but in a rather hurried ending, Kay dispenses with her aimless
life and returns with him to Greece.

The virtues of
this movie certainly do not include plot or straightforward
story-telling (never a Mankiewicz specialty); and unlike most “madcap
heiress” stories, it isn't really a comedy. It’s simply a romance, and
as such depends on the personalities of the characters. And in
interpreting the somewhat different script — for Kay is quite vain,
quite willful, and quite self-aware — Crawford does a fine job in
creating a thinking person. Brian Aherne is equally effective as a
dashing intellectual, a man secure in the extreme respect he is accorded
in his own field, and honestly contemptuous of those he views as
useless parasites.

The essential values of this movie
are actually in line with the social criticism of other 30’s productions
from such directors as William Wellman and Frank Capra, something you
really don’t expect from director W. S. Van Dyke; Kay’s friends are useless, and Terry’s disapproval is justified.
The problem for Joseph L. Mankiewicz as a screenwriter was stringing
out the story enough to fill out a feature film, a problem he didn’t
really solve. But in the process he actually inserted interesting ideas
into what might have been a very ordinary film.